


Playing God

by criticalwhale



Category: Homestuck
Genre: All Of These Alien Children Have Issues, Multi, SGRUB, will update with ship tags as more are added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-06-02 04:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 14,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6550486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/criticalwhale/pseuds/criticalwhale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternia is gone. The trolls play a game.</p><p>(12 character introspectives, Sgrub-era)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (feferi reflects)

Your name is Feferi Peixes and you are afraid.

No, not afraid. That is a word that has always belonged to other trolls, to those who had faced the dangers of Alternian society every night without the guarantee that they would make it until dawn. The only threat that you had ever concerned yourself with was the distant promise of an untouchable Empress, the knowledge that you would one day fight and die by each other’s hands. Though the prospect of dying had always concerned you, you couldn’t be afraid of her when the very reason you desired to take the throne was to rid Alternia of fear.

And now you have succeeded, because Alternia is gone and trollkind is gone and it is just you, and your friends, and the impossible world that you have found yourselves in. Looking out from your fishbowl of a castle over the Land of Dew and Grass, the stormy Alternian sea replaced by fields of fuzzy greenery and a beautiful sky, you feel more lost then anything else. Broken or not, your planet had been your home, and your entire life dedicated to improving the lives of its people. Now that your purpose is gone, what else do you have?

(You recall, absently, a plaque that you had found in a consort village. Hero of Life, it had said - the Hero of Life will Restore us)

“FF,” a voice says, raspy and worn from sweeps of misuse. You turn, noticing absently that your face has split back into that bubbly smile you always seem to sprout upon hearing him.

“Shoallux!” You greet, grabbing for his hands. He draws them in towards his body instinctively, but makes his smirking grin when you capture them and fold them in your own anyway. 

“Isth that a new one?” He asks. It takes you a moment to process the words beneath his lisp.

“A new what?”

“Fish pun,” he clarifies, reaching up to push back his colored glasses. They match the shoes that he is wearing, you realize, to the extent that articles of clothing selected to match nothing are capable of such. 

“Maybe,” you say. You like it. There’s quite a few puns that you can make out of Sollux Captor’s name. “Ready to go?”

He takes a step towards you, as best as he can on the lip of the aquarium. The two of you have been building walkways over it for the last couple of days, theoretically so that all of the landwellers can navigate your planet’s gate but in practice mostly so Sollux can get around without having to use a scuba mask. “KK trolled me.”

“Oh? Karcrab?” Despite Karkat being Sollux’s server player, you have yet to meet him in person. You have yet to meet most of the others in person, actually - from what you can tell from Trollian chats, most seem to have split into little groups of two or three to explore their planets, coordinated primarily by Karkat’s frantic yelling.

“Technically its the KK from three hours in the future,” Sollux clarifies, and you shake your head in wonder.

“More time bullfish?”

He nods. “He’s mad at me for being late for a meeting. A meeting that I haven’t been invited to yet.” He laughs a bit at this, or does whatever passes for laughing with Sollux, a few quiet wispy chuckles and an upturned grin. 

You widen your own smile, too, reassuringly. “So we have three hours before we have to do anything?” You think that that’s how the time stuff works, anyway.

“Unless I don’t listhen to him and ditch,” Sollux points out. There’s a dinging noise on his phone, and he pulls it from his pocket, eyes skimming over whatever message he had received. “Nevermind. KK says that I just got there.”

“Shoald I go with you?” You ask, trying and failing to avoid giving away your eagerness. “You can properchly introduce me to him!”

Sollux frowns. “You know KK,” he points out. “You’ve been talking for almost a half sweep.”

“Not for reel.” Because there’s something to looking at another troll’s real face for the first time, something to reading their body language when you talk to them, feeling their physical presence beside you. You hadn’t noticed it before, when Eridan was the only physical link to the rest of Alternia you trusted yourself with, but after spending the last few days with Sollux you can see the merit of interacting with the rest of your friends in the same way.

“If you want to come, you can,” Sollux offers. He cranes his head over the ledge, where the glass of the bowl slopes outward before the curve shifts and hugs back towards you, shifts his body against you until you are almost touching. “Should we…?”

(Hero of Life, your consorts had whispered, quietly, as you passed by their settlements. They said it in such a reverent tone, one driven not by fear but by hope.)

“FF?”

“Shore!” you blurt, fuchsia heat rising to your cheeks. “Water we waiting for?” You ease towards him as he simultaneously moves closer to you, tightening the grip on your hand and moving his other arm to grasp your shoulder. Sollux’s face screws up in concentration - it is almost adorable how he can write impossible code without stress, move buildings with his psiioniics without blinking an eye, but requires concentration for something as simple as moving you.

His eye sparks, light bursting outward from it, and the two of you are suddenly surrounded by a haze of red and blue. You close your eyes, cling a little tighter to Sollux for reasons both natural and impulsive as he lifts both of you off of the bowl, hovering in the air only for a moment before your feet touch the damp ground. It’s an exhilarating feeling, flying - you can do it on Derse, swoop and soar around its great towers until it looses all novelty, but in real life you can only accomplish it with the help of someone like Sollux.

He lets go of you, takes a few steps forward through the tall, hazy grass. You follow, trailing behind him as the two of you make your way towards the consort village on the horizon. Sollux could fly the both of you over in seconds, could pick up your entire hive and move it there through sheer will. He’s an amazingly powerful psiioniic, the like of which you’d heard about more in old lusii tales than in real life.

But then again, all of your friends are exceptional individuals. Equius is an amazing mechanic, Vriska and Tavros both possessing their own psiioniic skills, Aradia somehow able to manipulate time on top of her existing psychic abilities. Even Karcrab, who had always seemed to you more funny and cute than threatening, has more than proven himself since entering the Medium - somehow, he’s become a decent leader for the twelve of you. Once upon a time, that would have been your job - to lead not only these 12, but the rest of trollkind. Your fuchsia blood and terrible birthright had been what had made you special, not the individual abilities your friends seem to hold in abundance.

(Hero of Life, you think, and for a moment the entire planet seems to thrum with approval, echoing the words back at you, occupying your thoughtspace and-)

You stop, suddenly, digging your bare heels into the dirt. Sollux turns towards you, alert, but when he sees that it is not some imp or monster that has given you pause his expression shifts to confusion. “FF?” He asks.

“I… wait just a moment,” You say, lacking any other explanation. 

Sollux, to his credit, simply nods and pulls out his shellphone. “‘K, FF. Tell me when you’re done.”

You wait until he turns, then settle yourself down in the dirt, not caring when your skirts drag in the mud. Your palms press into the ground, and you squeeze into the soil and plantlife. Closing your eyes, you take deep breaths, try to picture the feeling that you had just experienced. It had seemed, somehow, that you could feel the planet, could breath in time with it…

Then the moment passes, and you rise to your feet, grin becoming more manic. “Shoallux!” You shout, and he startles. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m the Hero of Life!” You feel suddenly, startlingly, confident about this.

Sollux blinks, looking towards you. “Hero of Life?”

“You must be the Hero of Doom, then,” you speculate, different artifacts and clues that you have stumbled across in the journeys throughout your two planets snapping together as you speak, adding, “We’re the Heroes that the plaques talk about.”

“Like the ones in my consort village?” He makes a bit of a face, and you remember how gloomy his had seemed in comparison to yours. “You think that’s what those mean?”

“Yeah! Do you?”

Sollux hesitates, nods. You wouldn’t be surprised if he guessed this already. He doesn’t seem nearly as enthused about this as you do, in any case. But he smiles anyway, to the best that he seems to have the ability. “That’s cool, FF.” You can feel his gaze against your face, know that he’s watching you to make certain that that was a friendly enough response.

“It is,” you agree. Turning this speculation over in your head, you pause for a moment, listening. Whatever it was that you had felt is still there, faintly, in the background. Then, at loss of anything else to say for the time being, you hold your hand out to him. “Come on! We’ve still got to go to the village!”

When he again decides to hold your hand, your usual happiness over this is overshadowed by your realization. You still don’t know what this game really means, or what to feel about any of this, or what the vague wall prophecies and promises of Heroism mean going forward. But you think that you can be a Hero of Life, whatever that might mean. 

Because you don’t need to fix the lives of all of the trolls, anymore. Maybe you can make do preserving the lives of your friends.


	2. (eridan fires)

You pull Ahab’s Crosshairs to your shoulder, line up the sights with the great hulking beast clinging to the spire of the building next door. It can smell you. You could hear it clattering at the roof all day while you tried to sleep, letting out deep, keening moans that could almost be mistaken for gusts of wind. Given time, it might have found some entrance into even this relatively secure building, or become desperate enough to create its own. 

You fire, and a few tiles poking out from under the beast’s wings crumble into dust. A minute later, and the beast follows, screaming until the moment its face peels into laser-blasted nothing

Your name is Eridan Ampora, and you kill Angels. 

You figured out early on that this was your purpose in the game. All of you have Quests - Karkat had spent the better part of the first day and a half after you all entered Sgrub yelling at everyone to start figuring out what theirs is, and the better part of the day and a half following yelling at everyone to ignore Quests and focus on an ever-growing list of things that supposedly matter more. Some of the others still report progress on their Quests in the Trollian chats, pursued in free time when Kar or Vris or the others who were vying for Fef’s place as natural leader didn’t seem to have anything else for them to be doing. They describe the beautiful dungeons and towns the Quests require tromping through, tiny lusii with skin the color of troll blood, mythical items and prophesies, convoluted fetch quests. And above it all, a great beast each of them is supposedly destined to slay.

But the Land of Wrath and Angels is colorless, black and white buildings providing a backdrop for the black and white beasts that sweep the sky. The only mythical item here is your gun; the only prophesies the sounds the Angels make during the day, shrieks almost sounding like whispers when you listen hard enough. It’s unnatural. These creatures aren’t meant to exist.

Ahab’s Crosshairs is settled on the floor, between a crumpled ceiling tile and a bottle of Faygo. You take a swig of it, blanch at the taste. It’s disgusting, as usual, a sickly purple liquid with a flavor akin to what you’d get if you added syrup to recuperacoon fluid. You take another sip.

For a moment, you consider spending the day here, in the relative safety of this relatively secure building having a relatively safe bottle of Faygo. But it isn’t as if there’s anything worthwhile to do here, anything to distract you from the tedium of day to day life, nothing to get you any closer to the goal of this fucking awful excuse for a game. So you dump all of your excess items in your sylladex, pull Ahab’s Crosshairs under your arm, and start to walk. 

Down the slick stone steps that spiral through the core of each building, across the lobby, empty and undecorated but for strange statuettes and dripping candles, into the narrow streets that snake through the cardboard city. You don’t like the streets. They’re too open, leaving you exposed at nearly every angle despite the steep shadows the buildings lining them cast. You duck into another building the first chance you get, a crumbling structure that could probably collapse under the collective weight of the shits you’ve stopped giving. 

Your hive, as far as you can tell, is located at the exact center of this city. You can’t really confirm this, because every time you’ve tried to leave you find more skeleton structures, more gravel and plaster and filth stretching infinitely into the horizon. But all the main roads seem to lead to the spot where you first entered the Medium, spoking off into the never-ending maze of fuckin’ garbage, so you feel that that’s a safe bet. 

What was once a shipwreck has become a shipwreck with a vague mixture of perfectly generic rooms and entire buildings stacked haphazardly on top of it. Every time you look at it, it seems just a little bit taller, some other structure uprooted and placed on top - it’s nearly reached the eighth gate by this point. You don’t think that any of the others have done that yet, if Kar’s Trollian ranks are anything to go by. For all you know, the mistake that you see in front of you is the tallest structure between Prospit and Derse, and this shows no signs of stopping. Even though Fef refuses to talk to you, refuses to listen to a word you have to tell her no matter how hard you try to get her attention, she still seems to be building up your hive.

Without really meaning to, you have started up the stairs. They’re slippery as fuck, the steps too far apart, and Fef honestly should have warned you that the metal mush she decided to build them out of had an annoying tendency to catch the edges of your cape and send you toppling downwards. You try to remember why you’re here. This seems to happen often, finding yourself back at your hive without having a real reason to be there. Maybe you came to get a better view. It sounds like a good enough justification, so you go with that.

You reach the platform Feferi had constructed under the first portal and stop for a moment, leaning against the wall of your hive with a huff. It isn’t too far off the ground, here, but you can see above the decent portion of the surrounding structures due to the fact that the upper half of most have been sacrificed to the cause of Making Your Hive Pointlessly Tall. There are a few black shapes on the horizon, as always, and you attempt for a moment to mentally mark down their locations. One seems to be relatively nearby, in a block of hives that you’ve scouted out pretty well. You figure that that’s as good of a place as any to start.

Turning to descend the stairs, you pause, gaze catching on the first portal. It goes to Fef’s planet, you think. You know this in an abstract sense, not from personal experience with navigating the portal system but from the knowledge that, if the reports of the others are correct, the first portal should bring you to the land of your server player.

It occurs to you that you haven’t actually left the Land of Wrath and Angels since your arrival. You consider, briefly, the prospect of diving through the portal. Fef wouldn’t be able to ignore your messages if you screamed them at her and the mustardblood’s faces. She could do nothing to stop you from doing that, if you so chose; she has no way to prevent you from going to her planet and finding her and refusing to leave until she listens to reason. For a moment, you decide that, yes, you’re going to do this. It’s as good of a time as any.

Then a black shape detaches itself from a nearby building, wheeling up into the sky. You don’t know if it saw you, yet, but it’s only a matter of time until it does. So you turn towards it, line up Ahab’s Crosshairs with the widest part of its body, pull the trigger without regard for the safety of the buildings behind it. That gets its attention, if nothing else. It wheels towards you, letting out a harsh, moaning screech, and you manage to squeeze a couple more well-placed beams of light along its body before you curse loudly and scramble back to the safety of the stairwell. 

Then you shoot again, and again, adjusting the angle of your shots each time to keep up with the constantly shifting motion of the creature. One wing crumbles, and you twist your mouth into a harsh smirk and go for the other. You keep shooting, even when there is nothing left, when it is dead and gone and there is nowhere else to aim your rifle at. 

Then you spit in the general direction of where the Angel had been, or the portal, or both. Remind yourself to be a bit more aware of your surroundings in the future. Walk back down, still not entirely certain of what you are attempting to accomplish.

It would probably be irresponsible to leave without first ridding this planet of the rest of the Angels, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh, eridan, prince of trash and also garbage. eridan honestly racked up a pretty impressive bodycount before he was chainsawed in half. i kind of wish that he, along with sollux, fef, and tavros played a bigger part in the end of the comic, seeing as all of them appeared to have joined Team Aradia either during vriska's bullshit dreambubble pirate adventure or during [S] Remember. honestly all of them had a lot they probably should have talked about, considering that eridan tried to kill at least two of them.


	3. (gamzee delivers)

Your name is Gamzee Makara.

Your best friend’s name is Karkat Vantas. He squats in front of you, moving in and out of focus. Blink, and there are two Karkats, three Karkats, four. When he talks, it just sounds like one Karkat. 

“Can you say that again, Karbro?”

Karkat does the thing that he does where heat comes to his cheeks and his short stubby arms start waving around. He looks adorable, except you don’t tell him that because when you do more heat comes to his cheeks, and he waves his arms faster, until he stomps away instead and avoids talking to you. “I was trying to ask you what the fuck happened, shitsmoker, except apparently your thinkpan is so fucked up that you can’t show an ounce of normal troll concern even when your entire body is covered in…” He pauses, echoey voice fading into background noise. “That’s… that’s your blood, right?”

You grin, absently, let your hands fall against your face. When they come away, they are crossed with thin lines of deep purple. “It sure looks like my blood, bro. I don’t know any other grape jelly motherfuckers who aren’t one with our Mirthful Messiahs.”

“Oh. Good.” Karkat's face freezes up all nervouslike. “Fuck, that didn’t come out right! I’m not happy that you’re covered in your own blood! Do you think that I want to come up to someone’s hive to find it looking like the set of an amateur slasher movie?” You move your hand towards him in response, bop him on the chin, and he blushes and pushes it off. “What was that for?”

“Just…” You pause, consider your words carefully. “Motherfucking chill, brother.”

He glares down at your hand, and you wonder for a second whether he’s about to give you one of his unchill seriousnasty speeches again. “What injuries do you have?” He asks, finally. 

“Huh?”

“Injuries? Incisions from which blood is dripping from your body? Fuck, Gamzee, how much sopor did you even have?”

“I know what those are,” you interrupt. “Just not injured.”

Karkat’s eyes do the thing where they bulge a bit out of their sockets, the way that they would if you squeezed him real hard. This type of angry doesn’t look as adorable. “Gamzee, you fought a denizen.” He pauses, as though this is something you’re meant to respond to. “The giant monster slitherbeast abominations that live beneath the surface? The godlike beings designed to act as the ultimate guardians of our planets? The things that I told everyone to not, under any circumstance, fucking think about fighting until the lot of us have managed to become a shitton less useless than we currently are?”

“Yeah, Karbro.” At least you think that your bro is yelling about whatever it was that was down there. You don’t really remember what it was like.

“What… Where did the blood come from, then?” He does the thing where he pauses, then shakes his head back and forth real fast. “No, don’t fucking tell me, I don’t want to know. How did you beat your denizen?” 

“I hit the motherfucker with my clubs,” You offer. That sounds right. It’s how you’ve dealt with most of the monster bros that think they have the right to be on your motherfucking planet. 

“But…” Karbro shakes his head. “No. That’s impossible. Sure, I can see Vriska, maybe, or Aradiabot being enough of a dumbass to try that, but you?”

“It’s true, Bro,” you protest. “You just need to have a little faith. The Mirthful Motherfucking Messiahs gave me the righteous power to strike it down, so I did.”

“I can’t just accept that as an answer,” he growls. “Just give me a straight answer here.” You decide to do something more interesting and reach out your hand again. This time he dodges it.

“Karbro…”

“Gamzee, just…” He looks down at you, and you look back at him. “Fine. Sure. What the fuck ever. It’s dead now, and that’s what matters. We can kill them. Try to give me a hint on how the fuck we do that when you remember, will you?” 

You nod, sagely. “Sure. Anything to help out a brother.”

Karkat sits there for a few moments longer, then slowly rises to his feet. “First thing’s first, then. We’ve got to deal with your injuries before they get any worse. I’m going to go get bandages. Just… stay there and try not to fight more denizens.”

You try to tell him again that you aren’t injured, but he’s already gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah, gamzee. he wasn't really one of my favorite trolls during hivebent, and i didn't really mind the role he played in the murderstuck arc onward - honestly all of the showdown flashes were suitably creepy and nice, and hussie did some good stuff with act 5 part 2 subplots. i do wonder if he'll ever fucking make it out of that fridge though.


	4. (equius tinkers)

Your name is Equius Zahhak and-

“Equius.” You turn. Aradiabot stands behind you, hovering slightly above the thin cave entrance you had just walked out of. Her eyes burn orange.

“Aradia,” you say, lapse uncomfortably into silence. “What… are you here for?”   
She holds out her arm in response. It’s disconnected from her shoulder. You blink, trying to contain your surprise. Other Aradiabots have come to you with much worse injuries, but it can still be a fair bit of a shock to see them be so casual about it. “Fix it,” she demands, expression remaining passive.

You hesitate, glance around. Nepeta had been with you earlier - she had insisted on exploring the caves with you, bouncing about on outcroppings and down tunnels with no regard for her own safety or reason. It had been enjoyable, other than your moirail’s insistence on acting as if she intended to seriously injure herself. But it is almost day now, and she is back on LOLCAT.

So you take a step forward, relaxing the muscles in your arm in anticipation of picking up the arm of the Aradiabot. It is light in your hand, fragile, and you realize once again that you could easily crush the machinery in your palm. It is durable, too, and elegant, a perfect carbon copy of the hundreds of Aradiabot arms you have encountered over the past few days. Or perhaps it is merely almost identical - your index finger catches, suddenly, on an unleveled seal of metal.

“This was injured before,” you muse, quietly, to yourself. Aradiabot, of course, hears it and nods. “It was not repaired properly.”

“It was functional,” the Aradiabot offers. And it probably would have been - whatever wound had been inflicted on the arm had been small, enough to pierce through some of the accessory wiring but not enough to damage her joints or skeleton. But without taking a look inside of the arm, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether the wiring had been repaired properly, or whether it could conceivably break again in the future. The shoddy nature of the seal makes you doubt that whoever had repaired the Aradiabot the first time had been concerned about ensuring perfection.

And this arm has to be perfect. Aradiabot has to be perfect. In a machine this complex, less than perfect is less than functional, and you refuse to tolerate that in your work.

“Come, Aradia. I will repair this in my workshop,” you decide. 

“You can fix it now,” she accuses. It’s true, probably. You tend to carry around a few tools in your sylladex at most times - though on Alternia it had always been a sort of side note, after Aradiabot it had become a necessity. But a broken-off arm is a larger sort of matter, not as easily repaired by a wrench or two. And maybe, right now, you’d prefer it if this Aradiabot didn’t leave immediately after repairs like she always seems to do.

“It would be better,” you say, carefully, “if I had access to better tools.”

“No.”

“Aradia.”

“No.”

You take a deep breath. “Command me,” you say.

Aradiabot’s expression flickers into one of distaste. It seems to be her second most common emotion, after cold indifference and before burning anger. “No.”

“Command me to fix you here.” For a moment, you almost wish that she would. Instead, she starts to float away, boosters on her feet flaring slightly. Aradia doesn’t look back as you freeze, then reluctantly move to keep up with her. At least she appears to know her way to your hive by now - maybe it was another Equius who had patched up her arm last, whenever that had been. 

It isn’t that far away - there are quite a few interesting cave systems a thirty minute, hour walk from here, but you had only really come out here to avoid the fitful, sopor-rationed slumber all of you have had to put up with over the last few weeks. The two of you go around this hill, climb up a rock wall - rather, climb and fly up a rock wall, respectively - clamber onto the lip of the mesa that holds your crumbling hive. 

It takes up most of the mesa, now, the supports built up to no end to prop the towering, repetitive structure reaching up towards the gate that shinea guardedly overhead. You had always prided your house on its elegance, on the richness of the design and of the materials you had been provided. It is almost a shame to see such a hive in such a state of chaos, but you have to admit there are some benefits. It is safer for Nepeta to use the portal to visit you this way, for one.

Aradia bypasses the door entirely, floating upward to the window emptying into your work area. You consider jumping up after her, but cutting a few seconds off of your trip isn’t worth the broken roof tiles. You take the stairs, instead, noting with some relief upon gently easing open the workshop door that Aradia has decided to sit on the work table instead of… You do not know exactly what you expected her to do. Break something, perhaps, or leave, or do something similarly unpredictable. Instead, she watches as you turn on your worklamp, set her severed arm underneath.

It doesn’t take long to remove the replacement panelling. As you suspected, more then a few of the internal wires have been shredded, the entire wound gushing sparks and spurts of blue blood, pushed apart by something vaguely cylindrical in nature. A spear, perhaps - there had been other Aradias who had come to you with spears sticking out of their arms. The armies of Derse, from what you have seen from your time on the planet and from explorations of your own, on occasion appears to profess a fondness for the weapons.

You wonder, absently, if that had been what had happened to this Aradiabot - if a Dersite pawn had, by chance, managed to slip through her guard long enough to land a blow. She is almost certainly not your Aradia - the Aradiabot from your timeline, that is, who to your knowledge you have not come into personal contact with almost since entering the Medium. The ones who you have interacted with seem to have been some type of copy. You and the other trolls had long since deduced what exactly Aradiabot seemed to be capable of from her rare appearances and chat messages, and subsequently what the occasional remnants of blown-apart Aradiabots that were found, strewn about the plains and remote features of the majority of your planets, had come from. 

Aradiabot meets your idle gaze across the work table. Her Equius had not done an adequate job repairing the damage to her arm. Her Equius had not been there to reattach it. You would wonder what had happened to him, but this, too, could be deduced. 

It doesn’t take long to repair the arm, reattach everything and seal it until it is back to the elegant profession that had so prided you upon making the original Aradiabot. It also doesn’t take long to reattach it, to slowly connect each wire to those coming out of Aradia’s empty shoulder socket and weld the arm back into place. She is silent, clipped, through the whole experience, not even bothering to look at you as you apply thousands of degrees of heat to her metal flesh. You don’t remember if you gave her the ability to feel pain. 

When it is over, the Aradia stands. She flexes the arm, balls her hand into a fist. Then, slowly, she nods. “This is functional,” she says, in a voice approaching approving. “Thank you.” Her sheet of metal hair shifts, disks of rotating crystal materialize under her hands, and you realize that the Aradiabot is about to leave.

“Wait,” you say, surprising yourself. Aradia, compliantly, pauses. “The other versions of me… the other versions of my moirail… What happens to them when you leave?”

Aradiabot appears to consider. “This is the alpha timeline,” she says. It is a phrase that you have heard before, whispered from one Aradiabot to another on the rare occasions that more than one have required repairs at once, but not one that had been explained. “Everything else does not matter.” It is a clear message of dismissal, even clearer then the clipped, polite gratitude of earlier, and you feel pinpricks of sweat begin to spurt on your forehead. 

You turn away, wiping off the liquid with a discarded shirt, and when you turn back you expect Aradiabot to be gone. But she is still there, staring at something mounted on the wall. It’s a picture of you and Nepeta, something leftover from Alternia, when your time with the oliveblood had been far more rare and far more precious. Your moirail had taken it with one arm while she attempted to force the silly hat she insists on wearing over your hair. “Is… Is there anything else that you need, Aradia?” You ask, the sweat starting up once more.

“Yes.” She hesitates. “Don’t explore the caves with Nepeta tomorrow.” And then she is gone, faded in a burst of music that sounds like the empty space between two heartbeats. 

You tear your eyes away from her, or where she had been. Then you tear your eyes from the picture left dangling behind her, refocus them on the mess that this repair job had made of your workplace. It is littered with parts, and tools, and crystal droplets of deep dark blood. It is amazing, you think, how Aradia has become such an impossible thing. You had made her, and yet you cannot predict her. You do not know if Aradia can predict Aradia, anymore.

You had not predicted that she would say that, and she did not seem to expect it either. 

Tomorrow, you decide, you will spend exploring Nepeta’s planet instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> funny thing about equius. my favorite part about equius is adorable relationship with nepeta. my favorite thing about nepeta is her adorable relationship with equius. and yet neither equius's chapter nor nepeta's is about their moirallegiance. im gonna have to make it up to them in another fic.
> 
> equius was weird. but he really seemed to try for nepeta, and that felt Important. i hope he's doing well as a douchebag sprite and also probably LORD ENGLISH.


	5. (vriska Ascends)

Your name is Vriska Serket and you are about to fucking die.

You gasp, choke, clutch your hands to your chest because you were not expecting that, were not expecting Aradia to appear out of nowhere to STRIKE YOU OUT OF THE FUCKING SKY. Okay, so maybe that’s not accurate - there’s a long list of people who would pull stunts like that to get revenge on you, and Aradia has been near the top of the list ever since you found out that you hadn’t quite managed to kill her completely. But it’s fair to say that you didn’t expect your comeuppance to be in the form of the weird robot shell your creepy neighbor made traveling through time to get the drop on you. It’s fair to say that you didn’t expect anyone to succeed at getting the drop on you.

So you wheeze, and curse, and bite back the spittle spilling from your lips and onto your chest, because Aradia is not pulling any punches. She’s probably trying to kill you, now that you think about it - if she had even a remote interest in letting you leave alive she would have realized that she had gone to far when your ribs had cracked and blood began to gush from your mouth instead of air. You’d be pissed, but you suppose that you killed her first, so it’s probably fair when all’s said and done.

For one glorious moment, there is respite enough for you to fully take into account the sheer amount of pain that you are experiencing. Then Aradia towers over you, a column of metal and unshakable rage. She screams, and you almost want to scream, too, except you also want to smile and spit in her face and kiss her and laugh hysterically and slam her head against the floor over and over again until both of you can’t move for shit.

Then her hand strikes across your face and Terezi’s candy red cosplay glasses are peering down at you. The tealblood grins in the same way she used to when she was about to pass a verdict upon some unsuspecting FLARPer, raises her own arm, and deliberately copies the motion. 

(somewhere far away, tavros leans forward, eyes drifting shut in anticipation, until you _wrench_ sideways and he grabs his own throat and squuuuuuuueeeeeeeezes tight)

Somehow, Terezi’s slap hurts more than Aradia’s did. Terezi’s slap stings like your empty shoulder socket did on the day you woke up on your bedroom floor to find slivers of your arm scattered around you. Your neck snaps back, the whiplash a _8itch._ When you recover, both hands clamping your cheek - if this wasn’t your dreamself, that would leave a welt, a great 8ig ugly blue mark like the ones currently dotting your real body - the tealblood has thrown back her head and begun to _laugh._

(tavros reaches out two trembling fingers and dip them in the thick puddles of blood that pour out of your prone body)

You push your arms under you, try to prop yourself up. “What the fuck was that for?” You growl, as soon as you are able. 

She doesn’t stop laughing as she answers, “What do you think that was for?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I knew, would I?”

Terezi stops, brings her hands to her obnoxious red glasses. “Maybe this will remind you,” she says, pushes them up at the nose until they slide aside to reveal two murky red ovals.

 ( _Oh, now you want to kiss me?_ he scrawls in your handwriting, smearing splotches of blue against the ground _. Little l8, don’t you think?_ )

You force yourself to keep looking at her. “You’re still on about that?” You scoff, throwing back your head and smirking reflexively. “I did you a favor!” 

“Gee, Vriska,” the tealblood says, “I never knew that it was considered helpful to mind control your friends to stare into the sun until they go blind! Truly, I will have to attempt this friendmaking strategy on everyone!”

(Tavros’s eyes are wide, either from the sight of blood on his hands or his recent lack of oxygen or both. _Save your 8reath, page. I 8’nt dead just yet.)_

“Stop whining,” you complain. “You’re better off now and you know it! You can ‘see’ better now then you ever could before!” Air quotes go around ‘see.’ To be honest, you have no idea what Terezi’s whole smelling/tasting colors thing is, and you don’t really care to find out. “I didn’t get _anything_ good out of what you-” You grasp at the arm that had been blown off by the girl in front of you, feel for the scarred patch where Equius had attached your robotic appendage to your stump, and find only smooth skin. It startles you, and you have to take a second to remember that this isn’t your real body, that your Dreamself doesn’t have the same injuries as the real you.

( _Pick me up_ , you instruct, commanding his fingers to trace the letters. _Need to get somewhere fast. Are you ready to flyyyyyyyy, Pupa?_ )

“You deserved that,” Terezi counters. “You hurt Tavros, and killed Aradia. It was my duty as a Legislacerator to sentence you for it. Just as I have the right to sentence you for deliberately injuring an officer of the law.”

“Oh, really?” You sneer. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, Terezi, but Aradia beat you to the punch on that.” Literally. If you were the type of person to make cheap stupid puns, you might have laughed. “If you want to kill me -” the grin on your face is vicious enough to rival Terezi’s - “you’re going to have to get in line.”

(He sets your prone body against the Light symbol on the floor, pulls one of your arms out from under your chest and gently sets it at your side. _I won’t make you do it. This is up to you. Here’s your chance._ )

 The tealblood laughs again, then, and so quickly that you nearly miss it rattles off, “I sentenced you to a slap.”

 “Huh?”

 “I slapped you,” Terezi repeats. “A few minutes ago. You don’t remember?”

 “Of course I remember! It’s my face that you slapped!” Then your hand flies to your throat, and you gulp back the mouthful of blue that threatens to escape it. A few dribbles trickle out, staining your golden dreamer dress with cerulean specks. “What the hell?”

 “Hey, I didn’t do this!” The girl across from you says. “Aradia got to you first, remember? Seems like even you can’t escape death, Spidertroll.”

 You snort, then begin to laugh, hysterically, let your 8lueberry 8lood spray against your skin and your clothes and the shiny Prospit streets.

 ( _8ut do it fast, ok? Please don’t make me 8leed to death slowly._ )

 You close your eyes tightly, wait for the phantom pain of Tavros’s lance to cut through your gut. Instead, a smooth voice washes through the air in smooth tones reeking of a level of smug that you and your Scourge Sister could only dream of reaching. _“Thief. Why not take control.”_

 ( _NO!!!!!!!!_ you protest, violently throwing the voice out of your mind. _This is his decision. I know he can do it._ ) 

 But the flash of pain doesn’t come. Instead, your entire body screams as the injuries you had blissfully escaped a few minutes before come roaring back, the blood pooling against the Light symbol, flooding across space and void to Prospit. 

( _Tavros, hurry up!_ )

You chance a glance at Terezi. The other girl has backed away, grin slipping just a bit. “Goodbye, Vriska. I really hope that you’re happy with whatever happens next.” 

( _KILL ME_ )

You grit your teeth, block out your discomfort. “Believe me, I will be. 

The voice returns, nudges its way back into your mind. “ _It is what a thief does. End this.”_

A scream rings out from both of your bodies.

(DO IT YO8 COW8RD K8LL M8 K8LL M8 K8LL M8 K8LL M8 K8LL M8 K8LL M8 K8LL-)

You push, shriek, nearly double over in pain. For a moment, your heart stops.

There is a distinct feeling of nothing.  

Then you open your eyes and gasp in a breath of chilly LOMAT air. For a moment, you are still, silent, taking in the breadth of the ocean surrounding you and the odd fact that you are somehow floating without the use of your rocket boots. You note, offhand and distantly, that your injuries are gone. That, just like with your dreamself, your robotic arm and replacement eye are back to solid flesh and blood. That orange robes have inexplicably materialized on your body, that there are blue wings fluttering behind your back, that a sense of power and strength and light is running through your veins. 

Your expression shifts into a smirk. Things could have gone smoother, sure. In an ideal world, your death would have been quick and painless instead of the result of a drawn out, messy revenge kick from Aradia. But you’ve always been lucky enough for everything to end up working out alright.  

“Thanks, Terezi. I am happy with this,” you say, aloud, to nothing, laugh when nothing responds. 

The Thief of Light is Ascended. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah yes, vriska. trash queen of my heart. honestly vriska is so undeniably terrible, yet still startlingly complex enough that i can't help but love her regardless. i love her whole quote of "you don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero. You just have to know who you are and stay true to that." i feel that it really encompasses her as a person - she may not be good, and she may do terrible things, but ultimately she still remains a compelling 'hero' despite this.
> 
> that's not to say that i don't fully realize the bad aspects of vriska's behavior - i hope i made that pretty fucking clear in this. it's just that she has complex enough motivations for her to be able to progress the plot in a productive way. and it's even possible for her to learn from her past actions and attempt to do better, to try to become a good person on her own terms, as (vriska) does.
> 
> i'm going to stop with the vriska discourse now and just say that regardless of the Many Faces Of Vriska Serket her god tier ascension scene in comic was fucking brutal and a combination of disturbing and compelling in all the right ways and i hope i did it justice.


	6. (terezi judges)

Your name is Terezi Pyrope, and you are currently indulging your hobby of bringing criminals to Justice. 

“Mr. Nak.” You pause for dramatic effect, hands bobbing in the air for a moment. “Do you swear by the Glory of the Alternian Empire to speak the truth, and nothing that could be construed as not the truth?”

Mr. Nak makes a clicking noise, somewhere between the sound of bubble wrap popping and the clattering of bones. You take that as a yes. 

“Please take your spot on the stand.” You pat the cushion next to you, admiring at how soft it feels under your claws, and grin as weight shifts and the consort takes its seat. “Now, I am going to ask you a few questions regarding what transpired three nights ago. Remember, refusal to answer is punishable by culling. I’ll start with an easy one.” You pause, then, and in the same voice the Legislacerators on your cop shows use for pre-propagandabreak cliffhangers shout, “Where were you three days ago?”

The consort clacks again. It actually sounds kind of adorable. You nod, seriously. 

“Yes, that is the alibi that you provided. And it would be awfully convenient if you were at your hive all day, wouldn’t it? After all, if you didn’t leave your hive, you couldn’t have attempted to _cull Ms. Blueberry.”_ The consorts in the audience make all sorts of alarmed noises at that - jumping up to their feet with loud clangs, asking you what culling means, or who you were talking about, or simply stammering aloud in excitement. They are not as knowledgable about legal proceedings as the witnesses at a real Alternian court would be. 

Perhaps it would be best to modify this trial somewhat, for the sake of maintaining an appropriate courtroom atmosphere. You sigh to yourself, silently mourning the departure of the days where concepts like Justice and Law were taken seriously at face value. “You couldn’t have attempted to _insult Ms. Blueberry,_ ” you modify. 

Immediately, the consorts begin to settle down, relieved at the familiarity of this offense. This is a good outcome. You may not be able to deliberate the serious case that you desired, but at least you won’t have a repeat of the instance in which one of the Honorable Salamembers of the Jury became confused and decided to blow spit bubbles at the overseeing Legislacerator. 

Despite the fact that the room, Mr. Nak included, has fallen back into impatient silence, you still act as if the consort is attempting to interrupt. “No, no. Do not waste the Court’s time with frivolous protests! It is obvious that you were the culprit!” You pause, lean forward, cup your ear for effect. “Hmm? What is your evidence, you ask? Why, of course I have evidence! What kind of court do you think this is?”

The Nakodile stands and begins to walk off of its pillow. You reach over and pull it back, darting your hand out of the way of its teeth. “You won’t see the evidence if you keep up that attitude!” You continue, even though the defendant appears to have lost the majority of interest in its case. “But though I am not legally required to share my reasoning with you, as long as you remain cooperative I will!”

Mr. Nak makes a noise that could be interpreted as confused or intrigued. You shape your lips into a practiced smirk. “Yes, this next witness should answer many of our questions. I call the next witness to the stand - your matesprit, Ms. Nak!”

You gasp at this startling, plot twist of a revelation, bringing your hands to your cheeks and giving your best expression of surprise. Truly, a witness betraying a quadrantmate in court is a shocking development, something reserved only for the most crucial moments in courtroom cinema!

Presumably, the equally shocked and intrigued reactions of your audience members are drowned out by the rather loud shout of, “Terezi!” that echoes through the room. Karkat’s candy red smell immediately follows it, appearing at the end of the row carved between the seated audience members. He seems to stop there, hovering uncertainly about as he continues, “You’re really pulling this bullshit again, Terezi?”

Frowning, you push Mr. Nak back down as he attempts to walk away again. “Mr. Vantas, we are currently deliberating the very serious manner as to whether the gentleman here committed the grave crime of insulting one Ms. Blueberry.”

Karkat probably rolls his eyes at this. That seems like a thing that Karkat would do. “This isn’t the time or place for you to rub your bulge over your Legislacerator kink, Terezi, I-“

You bang the hand not currently resting on the consort’s shoulder against the ground with your flat palm, making a percussive noise. “Order! Order in the court!” 

A few consorts, quite contrarily, begin to speak at this, one salamander beginning to chant, “Oh boy oh boy oh boy!” under its breath. But you continue, and eventually everyone but Karkat has fallen silent. 

“We don’t have time for this! If you’d stop to listen to me for a second-”

“Shh!” You hiss, loudly, until Karkat complies. “You may bring any matters to the attention of the court after she is finished deciding the current case.”

You think that Karkat is planning on responding to this until his footsteps stop a few feet away from you and his attention seems to turn to a different matter. “Wait, is that one of my consorts? Why did you bring one of my consorts to your planet? Did you run out of lusus-shaped wriggler comforters to play with or something?”

You sigh, deliberate whether you should push Karkat into one of the makeshift courtroom chairs before deciding that the resulting consort pandemonium would not be worth the effort. “Its name is Ms. Blueberry, I’m doing this because I fucking want to, and they’re called scalemates. Is there anything else that Mr. Vantas wishes to ask the court before the court is finally allowed some peace?”

“Yes! Mr. Vantas thinks that the court should stop being an asshole and focus on actual issues that matter instead of her oh-so-fucking-important consort playtime doofus hour!”  
  
“Now, what could be more important than consort playtime doofus hour?” You ask, folding your arms. 

“I don’t know, oh, maybe the fact that Vriska somehow figured out how to go God Tier? Correct me if I’m mistaken, but doing that seems pretty fucking important to me.” His voice is somewhere between smug and irate, and you realize that Karkat probably thinks that you don’t know about her ascension. 

Instead of explaining that, yes, you know about Serket, and yes, you saw her fucking dreamself die in front of you, you merely say, “Perhaps the court will find time to deliberate that at a future date. Would you like to take a seat in the audience until then?”

“Really?” Karkat asks, either in response to your question or your decision in general. “Fuck no. Find me when you want to do something remotely productive again.”

You feel only a little bit bad when he walks away, muttering to himself. The room is silent as his voice fades into the distance, drowned out by the sounds of your planet outside. When the sound of Karkat is completely gone, you make yourself turn back to your consort audience, plaster on your snide courtroom smile. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes, our lovely witness, Ms. Nak! If you will, please approach the podium.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so disclaimer here - terezi is my favorite character in homestuck, if not my favorite character of all time. she is amazingly complex, with tons of different sides to her and how she reacts to various statements - i could talk for days about pre/post G.O. terezi.
> 
> this, however, is an attempt at Alternia-era terezi, or terezi as we first see her - rather abrasive, caught up in her own games, invested in her friends but not to the point of that overriding her other interests. such as, for instance, her rather confused sense of justice and oftentimes hypocritical dedication to such. it is this set of interests and personality traits, perhaps obviously, that provide the basis for the complex developments in terms of her interpersonal relationships, morals, and sense of self that we see later on.


	7. (kanaya appearifies)

Sure enough, there is a frog under the boulder when you arrive. It is small, with slimy skin the same color as your blood. When you reach for it, it squeezes through the space between your palms and hops away. When you manage to catch it, holding it to the flower-patterned fabric of your dress, it is just barely bigger then your palm.

The frogs do not like to be picked up. You discovered this early on in the process, mostly due to the fact that, when you are attempting to collect things, if said things do not wish to be collected it can throw the metaphorical torque-applying tool into your plans. So you make certain to keep a firm grip on the frog’s squishy midsection, pat it in an awkward and ineffectual attempt to sooth the creature, and make your way back up the island. 

There is already grass beginning to grow here, you notice, small tufts of it appearing beneath your feet as you walk. A few days ago, it had still been underwater. Today, what can be considered a coast lies a few hundred paces further from where it once was. Since you first lit the forge, the area of each island has seemed to double, triple, quadruple from its initial size. Though you hadn’t minded being restricted mainly to the steep areas where land would poke above the waters prior to that, you have to admit that it is pleasant to have more room now. 

This particular frog, thankfully, was on the island where your hive is currently located, and thus it is not necessary to make your way over the water to return. Instead, you merely hike up the slope of the mountain, to where your overbuilt hive rises into the atmosphere. Unlike the hives of most of the others, yours has retained some amount of style throughout even its constant remodeling, the various swaths of color you used to hang about it replicated in a tasteful way. It is perhaps one of the only upsides to having Equius as your server player, you suppose - if nothing else, the troll is well versed in order and engineering. 

Karkat, predictably, is hanging outside of your hive’s primary door, arms crossed haughtily about his chest, expression one of perpetual annoyance. His eyes snap upward when he sees you, his legs unconsciously propelling himself a few steps towards you before he stops, bouncing on the balls of his feet impatiently as you approach. “KANAYA!” he hollers, as soon as you are remotely in earshot, and you instinctively attempt to hurry as much as one can wearing an A-line skirt and holding a small amphibious creature while still retaining some amount of poise. 

“KANAYA!” he calls again when you reach him, this time perhaps too loudly considering his proximity to you.

“Yes, Karkat?” you reply cordially. “What is it that I can do for you?”

“There’s five more frogs I need you to look at,” he says, expression uncharacteristically serious, and you marvel at the fact that such a sentence would probably be considered humorous under any other circumstance. 

“Of course,” you say, because you hadn’t expected anything different. Frogs have been the only topic the two of you have discussed since Kakat arrived on the LOROF. Tiring as the conversation topic has proven to be, you suppose that it is better than not talking about frogs. There had been a period of about a day where he had instead opted to commandeer your frog breeding operation, selecting everything himself and attempting to order you about in his desire to get all of this over with as soon as possible. When the two of you discovered that you, as the Space player, had far more of a knack for choosing frogs than he, Karkat had begrudgingly backed off.

It was probably a very difficult thing for him to do. Even before the game, he had always been fairly intense, or at the least far less mild and far more uptight than you. Karkat had hated lacking control over his life, ranting for hours about those who attempted to be superior to him and refusing to listen when someone doubted the dreams and desires he had laid out for himself. As the self-declared leader of your group, these qualities in him had become far more prominent. 

It can be annoying at times, what with his constant need to control everything the twelve of you do in this game, but you feel that the thing you mind most is his inability to accept assistance in his leadership endeavors. Yes, you admit that the majority of your friends really should not be trusted in regards to making any sort of decisions, but you sometimes wish that Karkat realized that there are some trolls capable of and more than willing to shoulder some of the metaphorical load of keeping everyone on track. 

“Kanaya?” Karkat asks, quietly, and you realize that you have likely been standing there silently for a period of time most would consider slightly too long. He reaches over, waves a hand in front of your eyes. “Hey, Alternia to Kanaya, it’s time to pull yourself out of creepy fucking contemplation time and return to-”

“I’ll put this frog away,” you volunteer. He stops, as if he had forgotten that the frogs you’ve collected are living things that you can’t just allow to hop about the place; considers, nods.

“Just come to the Appearifier room after. I really need you to look at these frogs.” He stops, a vague look of disgust coming over his face. “This is really fucking weird, isn't it?”

“Frog collecting?” He nods. “I must agree that it was not exactly what I had expected from the game,” you admit. 

Karkat laughs a little, somewhere between genuine and reflective of the panicked state he seems to constantly find himself in. You smile, even though he isn’t, resist the urge to pull him with you as you walk inside the hive. You continue down the hall as he ducks into a side room and try not to look back. 

It has long since passed the point where the sheer amount of frogs you have accumulated has presented the need for a place to store them all in an organized fashion. You keep the frogs that were collected purely for the purpose of gaining their paradox slime in a room that is essentially an exact copy of your block, except with all of its furnishings replaced by tanks of water. Every few days, you’ve been releasing the frogs back into the wild. Soon enough, the frog that you currently hold in your hands will be allowed the same, but for now you put it in one of the smaller tanks. 

You pat it on its head, twice, gentle yet firmly. A few days ago, you might have washed your hands after unintentionally covering them with frog slime, but it really isn’t worth it when you are going to go back out and collect more in a couple of minutes.

Karkat is waiting for you when you get back to the Appearifier room, feet tugged up against his chest on a flimsy chair. He gestures towards the screen in front of him and the seat beside him in one movement. “Here’s the first frog.” 

Careful not to crease your outfit as you sit down, you look appraisingly at one frog. And the next. And the one after that. There are very few physical differences between the amphibians, but you still know immediately which ones would be best for Genesis Frog purposes. “The first, second and fourth frogs look to be most suitable,” you say, after Karkat’s impromptu slideshow is finished. In actuality, it is not what you see in those three frogs but a sort of feeling that you experience when you look at them that draws you, some knowledge that each has the potential to carry the vast folds of space and time within itself, but this is not something that you need to specify. 

Your friend frowns. “The third one is closer,” he complains. “Will it honestly make that much of a fucking difference if we just go out and grab the ones that are actually located a reasonable distance away? Is Skaia stupidly petty enough to flip its ridiculously complicated and partially metaphorical shit over picking up a frog not even a bloodshade off of whatever the ideal one would be?”

“Karkat,” you say, chidingly.

“Kanaya,” he says, in the same tone.

“I thought that we agreed that trusting my aspect-related instincts on this issue would likely save more time over an extended period.” You hesitate, actually do place your hand on his elbow in what you would consider a calming manner. “Unless if you wish to argue this point, I suggest that we finish collecting these frogs. I doubt that either of us wish for these shenanigans to go on longer than they need to.”

He actually lets your hand rest there for a moment before shrugging you off, pulling the husktop keyboard over to himself. “Fine,” Karkat concedes, tapping a few buttons, and a moment later three of the tubes in front of you begin filling with paradox slime the color of Nepeta’s blood. “Three vials of weird lusus genetic fluid, coming right up.”

You frown a bit at the word choice, but nod approvingly when all of the vials are topped off without incident. “Should I leave to collect the frogs right away?” 

“Sure,” he says, then, “Wait. No. Do you think I should do it?”

“I am perfectly capable of collecting the frogs myself, if that is what you are asking.”

“You don’t think I know that? I just thought that it might go a little faster if I grabbed one or two for us.” He huffs, falls back defensively, and you marvel for a moment at Karkat’s ability to act affronted even when offering to help. 

“Last time that I suggested you assisted with this, you informed me that you needed to stay at the Hive to keep the ‘bulgesucking morons we call teammates’ in line.” You make certain to place air quotes around Karkat’s rather colorful choice of words.

“Hey, in my defense, I was attempting to deal with your asshole moirail deciding that now would be a great time to test the limits of SGRUB’s extra life mechanic,” he says, dismissively. “I don’t have to do that today.”   
You consider. It sounds as if Karkat is attempting to apologize to you, or at least to help more with frog collecting in the future. Even though the intent is muddled through his typical layers of anger and contradictory actions, you can appreciate the sentiment. “I suppose that both of us should be starting, then.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Karkat grins, or makes a weird sort of grimace, which you have accepted passes as a grin for him. 

As you leave the block together, you cannot help but recall his earlier mention of Vriska. Though you have long been aware of the complexities regarding your arrangement with the ceruleanblood, you had thought that you would be able to push aside your red feelings for her in favor of continuing your moiraillegence. If your analysis of the past weeks are correct, however, you have been prioritizing assisting Karkat with his emotional troubles over those of your actual palemate. In all honesty with yourself, you are not certain what to think about this.

It is better, you remind yourself, to hold onto your existing mutual relationship instead of shifting that to pursue two relationships that are likely not mutual. After the game, you can attempt to return to your normal relationship with Vriska. For now, you can enjoy frog collecting, and finishing your Quest, and avoiding making the entirely too complicated business of SGRUB more confusing than it needs to be. 

“I will collect the two frogs closest to the hive,” you decide, and move on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love kanaya. she is so good and really tries to do her best to help others. i love how she balances being extremely capable in combat and in general physically with her skills as an emotional mediator. though as the whole Vriska situation and reputation as too much of a meddler evidences, she is not immune to fault in terms of managing the emotions of herself and others, but kan is nonetheless pretty good at and dedicated to trying to being good at understanding and managing interpersonal relationships.
> 
> that's why i decided to write about her time managing Frogs here - besides that being perhaps her primary role in SGRUB, it would be a time in which she would indirectly have to address her own troubles with vriska (which i should really explore further some other time) and indirectly karkat's troubles with the rest of the group. i've always really valued her and karkat's friendship and occasional vaguely pale overtures on her part especially, so this hopefully served as a good way to look at these.


	8. (nepeta matchmakes)

Your name is Nepeta Leijon, and you are currently carrying two teapots to the best of your ability considering your claws and the long coat dragging on the ground and the mounds of scattered sugar your feet keep plunging into. There was a reason why you handled Equius’s fragile, breakable tableware about as much as Equius himself had back on Alternia. You are not the best troll to have around to handle stuff that can be crushed by your fearsome claws! It is only out of necessity that you have learned to use all the fancy items and foods and drinks that seem to make up the surface of your planet, enjoying the hot beverages and brittle little cups that you would have turned your nose up to before, so it never hurts to be a little claw-tious when handling them! 

Equius is waiting for you on a ledge of white sugar cubes just beyond your hive. He makes a little bit of a grumpy face when he sees you, winces noticeably as you nearly spill one of the pots. “Nepeta, will you-“ You slam one down beside him, and he scoots over to avoid the splattering of tea that falls into the sugar cubes. “Would you please-“ The of the pot slips a little, nearly falling sideways, and you happily push it up with your foot. “Nepeta-”

“What tea would you like, Equius?” You interrupt, falling onto your knees beside him. He sweats a little, pushing his cracked glasses up to his eye level, and you make a face.

“Nepeta, stop this nonsensical-“ He began, cutting himself off at your chastising glare. “What types of tea are available?”

You dart a finger out, dragging it through the tea splattered on the outside of the pot. “Hmm,” you begin, contemplating. “One is nice and sweet, and the other one tastes like herbs and stuff.” He moves, drawing towards the teapots, and you finish, “The second one is boring and tastes gross, so I got it just for you!”

“Er…” he begins, stopping. “I will have the second one, then.” 

“Okay! Just a mewment!” You pull a pair of teacups from your sylladex, one a nice blue cup you found in one of the dungeons and the other plain white with extending triangular ears you made from alchemizing a normal cup and your meowbeast hat. He waits, fiddling with his fingers as you pour his drink, push it away to pick up the other teacup. When you finish, you carefully pick up Equius’s and reach out to him. “Here you go! Careful - it’s pawfully hot.”

Carefully taking the cup from your hands, he places it down, arranging it in front of him. Then, glancing up, he looks towards you. “Nepeta-“

“Mhm?” You scoop a pawful of the sugar, sprinkle it gently into the tea before giving in and dropping the entire clump in. It sits at the top for a moment, melting in when you jiggle the cup. “Equius, what is it?”

“Thank you,” he says, haltingly. “For the tea.”

“Anything for my meowrail!” You scoot next to him, poking Equius in the side. He waits until you move away again to retroactively tense, and you stick out a tongue and rebelliously pick up a bit more sugar. 

Equius side-eyes you. “That appears to be a little excessive,” he says, with his usual aura of Stern Lususlike Disapproval. “Perhaps less sugar would be preferable. Much less.”

You frown and take a sip of your resulting mixture. It’s sickly sweet, the liquid practically a semisolid mush. “No, it’s purrfect!” He cringes at your enthusiasm, and you belittlingly jostle him again. “You should try yours!”

He stares back at you for a moment. Then, movements robotic, he reaches out to delicately grab his drink. “Is it…”

“Go on!” You encourage, prodding him.

“Of course, Nepeta.” He pauses awkwardly before taking a hesitant sip. “This is… quite pleasant. Very… interesting.” Equius’s face is twisted in something that you’d think was pain if you didn’t know better. “Thank you.”

“Anything for my meowrail!” You say, cheerfully nudging him again. He crushes part of the teacup’s handle, but manages an awkward smile. “Speaking of which…”

Very quickly, the smile disappears. “No, Nepeta.”

“Yes!”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to mew,” you complain, fixing him with your saddest expression. His mouth twitches, and you cheer to yourself as he begrudgingly turns towards you.

“Very well,” Equius allows. “What is it?”

“As your Moirail,” you begin -

“Mhm-”

“-it’s always been very impawtant to help you with the rest of-”

“Nepeta-”

“-your quadrants, which I know you don’t like but you haven’t-”

“Nep-”

“-made much pawgress with-”

“-eta-”

“-so I really think it's time for the Shipping Purrfessional to get involved!” You finish, grinning up at him.

He wipes off the sweat that has accumulated on his brow - you dance away to avoid that, because ew, Equius, stop. “There is not much there to discuss.”

“That’s not true!” You yell, jumping to your feet. Some of your tea spills. “I saw Aradia kiss you! That was… red? Red! I added it to my shipping wall!”

Equius shrinks back more than he already has, resolutely staring down into his drink. “On further examination, I must say that I highly doubt that Aradia meant our interaction as a red proposal.”

“Black, then?” You suggest, with a bit of hesitation. You’d have to change your shipping chart a little, but if it would make your meowrail happy you could spare a little paint! “I know you don’t like me saying this, Equius, but there are definitely some pitch feelings there we can work with! How about we-”

“I highly doubt that Aradia will be open to relationships of a concupiscent nature until the game is over,” Equius interrupts, drawn tone suggesting that the conversation should end here.

But you’re his moirail, not some random nosy troll playing shipurr during drone season, so you grin and suggest an alternative. “How about auspisticism? Maybe if Aradia says she’ll be in clubs with you, vacillating feelings will blossom forth between you, both red as the Empuress’s ship and black as the shell of an Imperial Drone!” Okay, maybe you’ve read a few too many of Kanaya and Karkitty’s romance novels. What can you say? They are a valuable tool in your profession. “Maybe you could mediate between Aradia and Vriskers! Or Kanaya could mediate between Aradia and you?”

“I thought that Kanaya was mediating between Vriska and the seadweller?” Equius asks.

“No, I’m sure she was trying to get between Eridan and Feferi,” you correct, then frown. “Maybe? Should I ask her?”

“If you insist on meddling with Kanaya’s own meddling affairs, I might be forced to mediate between the jadeblood and you.” You stare at him for a moment until you realize that Equiuswas trying to be funny. Then, snickering into the sleeves of your coat, you begin to giggle.

“Nepeta, control yourself,” Equius says, when your outburst has gone on for more than the situation requires. 

You restrain yourself for long enough to ask, “So do you want to-”

“I can attempt to make a relationship work with Aradia at a later date.” For a moment you try to interrupt, but a glare from Equius stops you. “A later date, Nepeta. That is all that I will promise.”

You hum, tell yourself to remember to bother him about this later, then move on. “Don’t think that I’m letting this go by, Equius! I’m going to keep trying to get you a quadrant with Aradia. But we can always consider other options!”

He lets out a sigh of defeat. Even though you know that he has no interest in talking about his options, he waves a hand to let you keep talking. “Fine. Get through this quickly so that we can move on, Nepeta.”

“Okay! One mewnite!” Grinning, you turn away from him and pull a few papers out of your coat pocket. A few drawings, a few pads of paper crumpled before Equius can see them, a ripped page from a novel are quickly stuffed back in. The remaining papers you lie out, flattening them against the sugar-packed ground. “There!”

He peers over at you. “Nepeta, is that…?”

“Yeah!” Red and pink and black and grey lines, the symbols of your friends scrawled across the paper. “Just a few notes for my wall.”

He frowns, concerned, at one scribbled-over page. “Do you not think that this is a bit extreme?” 

“Equius, shipping is a serious business,” you dismiss, pulling it towards you. “Now! Feferi?”

“What of the Heiress?” He asks, then, not bothering to wait for you to clarify, says, “Surely I am not worthy of her affections.”

“But she’s really nice!” You grin, nudge him, but he holds firm. “I’ll put it down as a ‘maybe,’ but you should really consider her! Eridan?”

Equius looks vaguely sick. “No.”

“Maybe black? Wait, no, he’s kind of a creep! Gamzee?” He opens his mouth to speak, but you cut him off before you can. “Also no.”

“The highblood-”

“No,” you say, firmly. “If anything, I’d get you an auspurrtice. Maybe Kanaya could…”

“We have been over this, Nepeta,” Equius says. You stick your tongue at him, but obligingly move down the list.

“Vriskers? You always had a nice pitch dynamic with her! And by that, I mean that you were always really annoyed when she would scream loudly at you from her hive.” Pausing, you reflect back on Equius’s neighbor on Alterinia, considering her bloodthirsty nature and penchant for severely injuring herself and others before remembering that his options are really quite limited. “I should ask her!”

Equius rises to his feet, again. “Do not do that, Nepeta, I command you to-”

“I was just joking!” You weren’t, really, but if he’s throwing that much of a fuss about it you don’t care. “Terezi?”

He sits back down, angered look fading to annoyance. “Stop going down a list of our acquaintances.”

“I wasn’t doing that!” Equius glares at you, and you huff. Okay, maybe going down in hemospectrum order made it a bit too obvious that you were fishing for any option, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

“Perhaps we could have an improper and petty conversation about your own quadrants,” he suggests.

“Equius, don’t change the subject.”

Your moirail, a rare look of vengeance coming over his face, leans forward. “How are your advances on the hemoanonymous boy proceeding? It is really quite improper, Nepeta, and I must insist that you determine his blood color before continuing further, so-”

“Hey! I don’t need help with Karkitty,” you protest. 

“Why is that?”

“Matters of the heart are my job! I know what I’m going.” He doesn’t look convinced. You turn back to your papers. “Which means that I can handle my quadrants, and your quadrants, and make everything work out for both of us if you just listen! Which means we have to go back to the next purrson on my list!” You cough, move to the present name. “Terezi?”

Equius pauses, just long enough for you to start drumming your fingers against your paper. “Nepeta?”

“Mhm?” You say, then, leaping onto the subject before he can slip away, “Terezi might seem scary and weird but she’s really cool when you get to know her and hasn’t killed too many trolls and-”

“I would appreciate it if you retrieve more tea,” he says, in a careful monotone.

His cup is still half-full. The teapot is, too. “But-”

“Please,” he says, a phrase rare enough to make you pause. You sigh dramatically and pick up the teapot. 

“Fine!” Turning, you stalk off to one of the large teapots situated on a ridge, grabbing a few of the scattered papers up on the way. “But you should have an answer for me when I get back!”

Your meowrail is stubborn. Very, very stubborn in a really weird and uncomfortable way that usually comes with way too much sweat! But you’re sure you can find two-to-four trolls from your group of friends to be his other quadrantmates. You will find out exactly what Equius needs in his other romantic partners in no time!

In the meantime you can find out exactly what Equius needs in his tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i like nepeta. she was genuinely nice, and loyal, and brave, and her dynamic with her moirail was cute despite equius being a generally sweaty bastard. im glad that she has found true happiness as one third of davepeta.


	10. (sollux prepares)

Your name is Sollux Captor, and you are currently marching off to go fight some weird shitty slitherbeast. 

“Do you know what your denizen’s like?” FF asks, head falling playfully to the side. You’re holding her hand again. By this point, you probably spend more time holding her hand than not. It feels kind of wrigglerish, all of the blushing and dancing around that the two of you have gotten pulled into, but you don’t really mind it.

“No,” you admit. “Big. Large. Looks like some shit slitherbeast.” You’re basically just repeating generic things she had told you about her denizen, and both of you know it.

“That sounds like it’s probably right,” Feferi agrees, anyway. 

She lapses into silence for a moment, and the two of you continue your circumnavigation of the pointlessly large mass of grey matter to your left. There are a larger amount of inconvenient brains on this planet than one might think. The Land of Brains and Fire is objectively ugly, and though neither of you have said it aloud both you and Feferi prefer LODAG by a significant margin.

Eventually, when the two of you stop to admire a particularly interesting spurt of fire, Feferi turns back towards you. “This is almost over, isn’t it?” 

“What’s over?”

“The game,” she specifies. “Sgrub.”

You consider that statement for a moment. There still seems to be some indeterminately complicated stuff left for all of you to do - finish off the denizens, fight the Black King. But you have also done a lot, comparatively, have cleared the planets and figured out the mechanics and ascend the weird levels that none of you can describe the exact significance of. “I gueth,” you say, finally, wincing a bit as your lisp comes on a little heavier than you would like. “Unleth it decides to throw more bullshit at us.”

“Solelux.”

“The bullshit doesn’t stop, FF. It just keeps happening.”

Feferi looks less than impressed. “Solelux Captor, stop being so pessimistic!” She chides. “You shoald think positive!”

“It’s kind of hard to be positive when your planet is dead, the entire fucking planet is out to get you, and your shoes are always covered in weird mushy grey matter.” FF holds her free hand to her mouth and suppresses a giggle at your last complaint. “Hey! I’m being serious! Do you know how hard it is to get brain sludge out of your shoes?”

“You can always alchemize more pairs,” she suggests, perfectly reasonably, and you pull a face. “Besides, they’re not that ruined!” 

“FF, don’t try to be a LOBAF apologist.” Feferi laughs again, and this time you consent to cracking a half-existent smile with her. 

“At least you won’t have to spend any more time here after this,” she points out.

You hum in agreement. “Thank shith for life’s small mercies.”

“That’s the spirit!” Feferi agres. You try to take another step forward, but her claws dig into the flesh of your arm. “No. This way.”

She tugs, and you stumble a bit, glasses shaking loose. “FF, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m pretty certain that I know more about where it is than you do.” Admittedly, most of that knowledge had come from flying over your planet in a begrudging attempt to scout it out, but the sentiment remains. 

“It’s this way,” she insists, tugging you loosely towards the north of the brain sludge you had walked around, and you hold up your hands in surrender. It isn’t as if you’re at a lack of time on this, no matter what KK or Vriska might insist. 

“Kay, but if you’re wrong I get to lord it over you for the remainder of our relationship,” you say, unthinkingly, then reflexively blush at your inclusion of the last word. “Uh, I mean-“

But Feferi is grinning, unconcerned - she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the implications you keep making of your thus far nonexistant quadranted relationship. “I’m right and you know it,” she says, cheerfully swinging your arms between you.

Not for the first time, you remind yourself of the very long list of reasons why the two of you should not enter a quadrant. The first reason being that that the last quadrantmate you had died because you weren’t competent enough to avoid killing her.

Your mind is still occupied with this when Feferi squeezes your hand a few minutes later, the gentle pulse stirring you from your thoughts and reminding you of your conversation. “Soleux,” she begins, hesitant. “I’ve been thinking lately that we… that you and I…” You suck in a breath instinctively, wondering if she is about to broach the issue you have been shying away from for the last few weeks. “…should fight your denizen together.”

“Huh?” You wonder, for a moment, if you had misheard her. When you realize what exactly Feferi had said, however, your answer is far more definitive than it would have been if this conversation was going the way you had thought. “FF, I’m sorry but fuck no.”

“Sollux, at least think-”

“No.”

“Give me a reason,” she demands, and you rub your free hand across your face and give in.

“You didn’t let me help you with your denizen,” you point out. “Remember? Fighting a denizen is supposed to mark the fulfillment of our personal journeys, or some weird Juggalo cultspeak like that?”   
“If you don’t believe that, you can’t use it as a defense!” Feferi counters. You sigh, rub your face.

“Look, FF, I can deal with my denizen just fine.”

She groans, as though you’re completely missing the point that she is attempting to make. “I know that!”

“Then why do you want to get in the way?” This is probably the wrong thing to say. You realize this as soon as the words leave your mouth, mentally prepare yourself for apologizing, only to falter when Feferi grasps your hand tighter instead of pushing you away.

“I just want to help you,” she admits. “You never let me help you!”

“Bullshit,” you blurt, immediately. “FF, you saved my life after I entered the game.” Or half of it, at least, or something shitty like that. You’d be happy about your deaths following your weird bifurcation rule if it didn’t mean that you. You know. Died.

“And you saved mine!” Feferi counters. “But since then, even though I’ve let you help me with everyfin, you don’t let me do the same for you! I reely want to help you,” she finishes, quieter. If you look really closely, her eyes are rimmed with pink liquid and no you are not going there you are not going to deal with Feferi crying because of you.

“Shouldn’t you be saying ‘kelp you?’” You say, except that is completely the wrong thing to tell because she takes in a huff of air in the same way that she does right before launching into some rant about Eridan’s stupid fishy face and you have to hurry to continue, “Okay, gee, fine, FF. I’ll… let you in more, or whatever.” It’s the same sensitive, pseudo-pale bullshit Aradia used to feed you, and you cringe at the rawness of the memory. “Just… lay off a little? You can be a little fucking stressful.”

She giggles at the vulgarity, pulls you into a stiff sidehug. “Thank you,” she whispers, uncomfortably, into your ear. You gently encourage her to let go as soon as she relaxes, try not to feel too relieved when she goes back holding your hand at a distance two-arm lengths away from you. “And I know you’re gonna do whale, Solelux! You’re gonna beat your denizen!” she cheers, and you grumble a little and mutter something sarcastic in reply, and she giggles and dances away again.

You wish, for a moment, that she would keep her distance. By now it’s pretty clear that most trolls that get close to you end up getting fucked over, that you are a beacon of bad luck in the same way that Vriska Serket seems to attract the opposite. This is both the type of self-pitying thinking that you would tease Karkat over, a logical assessment based on the extent of your powers, and something that Aradia told you, overlooking her Frog Temple, before she knew exactly how true that was. The universe has it out for all of you, sure, but it has always seemed to hold up the proverbial middle finger to you in particular. It would serve you and your stupid bifurcation kink right if both of the trolls you dragged into your clusterfuck of quadrants ended up dying because of you.

Then you berate yourself, because that is a bit too melodramatic even for you, and Feferi would either giggle in her fond way or act really concerned if she knew you felt this way and you don’t know what would be worse. So instead of saying anything important, you turn to her and meet her gaze and say, “Maybe my denizen will be a stupid fuck with two heads.”

She grins back, says, “Maybe it will be a small and cute stupid fuck with two heads, like a weird snake cuttefish!” and suddenly you can’t bring yourself to regret a thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im a gemini


	11. (tavros tries)

“Tav-ros!” Vriska sings. She’s perched on a boulder, leaning back on her elbows, bright orange boots crossed in the air. You stop your rocket car and put your lance back in your sylladex, grinning nervously at her. Reaching out with your mind, you gently suggest that the hoard of imps trailing you stop as well, and a moment later the sound of their clattering footsteps fades into scuffled silence. 

“Uh, hey, Vriska,” you greet, trying for an awkward grin. “When did you, um, get here?” Hopefully that comes off as curious instead of as an accusation. 

“Oh, you know,” she says, waving her arm. You don’t know. You didn’t actually think that she would come back after how badly you failed with her whole God Tier thing. “So how badly did your denizen beat you up?”

“Uh…” Vriska’s waiting expectantly, smile torn between mocking and gleeful. You swallow, pitch your voice up a bit instinctively. “It didn’t?” 

Her smile slips for a moment before coming back full force. “Did you run away, Tavros? That’s okay. If it’s too scaaaaaaaary for you, you can always leave it to those of us who know what we’re doing!”

“That’s, uh, nice of you, Vriska, but you don’t need to do that.” She opens her mouth, and you hurry onward before she gets a different idea about what you’re trying to say. “I kind of, um, beat it? Already?”

Her mouth closes, and for a moment, she looks dumbfounded. You would laugh at the expression, except that wouldn’t be very nice. “Really?” Seven pupils flicker disbelievingly between you and the army of monsters behind you. “Did it… not wake up? When you fought it?”

“It looked pretty, awake, to me,” you offer. A memory flashes through your mind, of the blue slitherbeast body rippling in waves as you approached, of it pulsing upward to the ceiling of the cavern, of it speaking in some weird alien language you could somehow understand perfectly. 

“Did one of the others help you, then?” Vriska guessed. “Was it Terezi? She’s such a meddlesome meddler.” She sighed in lament over Terezi’s meddlesome qualities, but you shook your head again.

“No, but the guys behind me, could be considered, ‘helping,’ even if most of them probably wouldn’t have helped, if it weren’t for my, uh, physic powers…” Your voice trails off, and you smile to fill the silence, straining your cheeks in a way that you know probably looks stupid and awkward. 

Vriska stares back, smile pulling thin. Then she laughs, tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Are you saying that my little Pupa finally grew up? That you managed to toughen up and beat Typheus by yourself?”

You shrug. “I guess that you could say that, if doing something reasonably impressive in combat is your definition of ‘growing up-’”

She hops up, and there is a flash of blue behind her that you realize are her wings. You had heard about them from some of the others, tried to stop yourself from picturing them in your mind, but to actually see them is surprising. She actually did become a God Tier, whatever that really means, with no help from you. For a moment, you remember the sight of her bleeding out on the floor beside you - your throat seizes up instinctively. There was a reason that you were trying to avoid her, and your game responsibilities, and the lumbering guilt of your cowardice.

Then Vriska flutters down next to you, wings flapping haphazardly in a haze of sparkles despite the fact that you are fairly certain that she isn’t using them to fly, and you choke the bile back. “Barely a scratch on you, too! Looks like you aren’t as much of a wimpy loser as I thought!”

You aren’t certain whether to be nervous or happy. “Thanks, Vriska.”

“Too 8ad it happened too late to help me!” She says, expression bright, and you nearly seize up again. Vriska keeps talking before you can say anything, apologize or regret or whatever else you were planning on doing. “How did you do it, huh? Was it too slow to dodge your lance?”

“Well…”

Vriska cuts you off with a hand motion, already looking distracted. “Tell me later. Karkat needs everyone to gather on his planet to prepare to go to Skaia. I think that his planet suuuuuuuucks and we should all meet somewhere cooler, but I don’t need to cause his tantrum.” She flickered a foot or two forward, turned back expectantly. “Well????????” 

“Uh…” You glance back at the army following you. “Now?”

Her eyes roll behind her glasses. “You need time to say goodbye to your monster army?”

You blush, nearly protest before realizing that yes, you would. “Uh, no?” You say, anyway. “But could I stop at my hive? Before we leave?”

“You have everything you need in your sylladex,” Vriska says, answering indirectly. You sigh, promise yourself that you will try to bring that back up when you get to your hive. 

“Okay, uh, Vriska. We can find Karkat.” 

She snaps off some response and starts off, but you only partially listen. Instead, you place your hands on the sides of your face, glance back at the monster army one last time. As soon as you break your psychic connection with them, it will most definitely be time to leave.

Before you do that, however, you consider the towering entrance to Typheus’s lair, the same entrance you had just marched victoriously out of. He had stood before you, speaking in an alien language that you could inexplicably understand. And you had listened, and told your monsters to hault, and tried your best to consider what he had to say despite everything the others had said warning you not to. He had asked you to make a Choice. 

You had remembered the Choice you had made with Vriska, and, hand tightening on your lance, done the opposite.    
Watching Vriska now, you cannot be certain if either of those had been good decisions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel tavros in general can be summarized by Deserved More. im fairly certain that one of his first scenes as a physical character in common was vriska forcing him to jump off a cliff. that doesn't bode well for the proverbial butt monkey of the group.
> 
> im glad that at the end of the comic tavros, at least, got some closure for what little of his arc was still relevant. him dancing in a memetic manner almost made up for his years of being paralyzed and then stabbed through the chest with his own lance, except it didn't because very little can make up for the trauma conga line the boy experienced. but it was at least a comfort, a symbolic act of him gaining authority and the ability to stand up for himself, which is what he most wanted anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is my 413 project. hope you all enjoy my tributes to some of the characters i've come to cherish and love. i'll post the rest of these over the next few days.
> 
> feferi peixes is an interesting case for me. i was never that attached to her when reading the comic, but she's one of my favorite characters to explore in AU Alternia settings due to her unique position as heiress. the contrast between her relatively auxiliary function in the comic and the important role that she would have played in troll society, had it not been destroyed, is what i was hoping to explore here.


End file.
